Nile Gardiner is a Washington-based foreign affairs analyst and political commentator. A former aide to Margaret Thatcher, Gardiner has served as a foreign policy adviser to two US presidential campaigns. He appears frequently on American and British television, including Fox News Channel, BBC, and Fox Business Network.

Lech Walesa cold shoulders Obama: the US president is clearly no Reagan

Lech Walesa, the great hero of the Polish Solidarity movement, was in Washington earlier this week to receive the Ronald Reagan Centennial Award. He gave a terrific speech, which I attended, in which he referred to Cuba, one of the last remaining Marxist tyrannies, as a “Jurassic Park of Communism”. Walesa remains one of the great political icons of our time, a brave freedom fighter who stood up to the Soviet Empire and led his people to liberty.

It has been announced that Walesa has decided not to meet with Barack Obama during the president’s visit to Poland. He has declined an invitation to join a group of Polish leaders in Warsaw tomorrow who will greet the president. Walesa is reportedly traveling to Italy for a biblical festival instead, and told Poland’s TVN24:

It's difficult to tell journalists what you'd like to say to the president of a superpower. This time I won't tell him, I won't meet him, it doesn't suit me.

I can see why Mr. Walesa has declined to meet with Barack Obama. The Obama administration’s approach to Poland, an important US ally, has been largely dismissive and lukewarm. In contrast to George W. Bush, who went out of his way to build friendships in eastern and central Europe, Barack Obama has paid little attention to ‘New Europe’, and has been far more interested in appeasing the Russians and “resetting” relations with Moscow.

President Obama famously threw the Poles under the bus when he announced that the United States would not proceed with Third Site Missile defences planned for Poland and the Czech Republic, and has largely treated the Poles as an afterthought in his drive to improve ties with the Kremlin and secure the New START Treaty. Obama has at times demonstrated extremely poor judgment when it comes to US-Polish relations, even playing golf during the funeral of Polish President Lech Kaczynski, the Polish First Lady, and 94 senior officials who perished in the Smolensk air disaster. The US president was unable to travel to Krakow for the funeral due to the grounding of flights over Europe at the time following the volcanic eruptions in Iceland, but he could at least have acted with dignity and respect at such as sensitive moment:

It is hard to think of anything more insulting to the Polish people on the day they mourned the loss not only of their president but much of their political and military leadership, for the president of the United States to be enjoying a round of golf after canceling plans to attend the funeral. It is yet another disgraceful example of crass insensitivity to a close American ally, which has become the hallmark of the Obama administration’s amateurish foreign policy.

But above all, I imagine that Lech Walesa is not meeting with President Obama because he knows the current occupant of the White House is no Ronald Reagan. Reagan was a true friend of the Poles, who fought hard for their liberation in the face of Soviet tyranny. The Gipper believed in strong US leadership, in standing up to America’s enemies, and in the importance of standing shoulder to shoulder with America’s allies. President Obama’s “leading from behind” approach is the antithesis of Reagan’s foreign policy, and one which has frequently undercut US alliances rather than strengthened them.